“circlehat do you Do you call traditional medicine effective? “Medicine.” This old joke contains more than a milligram of truth. For example, when Chinese chemist Tu Youyou began testing sweet mugwort used in local herbal medicine as a treatment for malaria, her isolation of artemisinin saved millions of lives, and in 2015 In 2012, she won the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
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However, not all folk remedies have been closely tested, and neither have all symptoms. More than 1.7 billion people, most of them living in the world’s poorest countries, are affected by 20 diseases known as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). These often cause disabilities and place a huge burden on health systems that are ill-equipped to deal with them.
They’re called “neglects” for a reason. In a study published in 2009, international health, it is estimated that of the money rich countries give to poor countries for health purposes, they receive only 0.6%. The situation has not improved since then. A recent report by Policy Cures Research, an international think tank, estimates the cash available for treatment. NTDs has been flat for 10 years, with a lower proportion of malaria or tuberculosis allocating together than either malaria or tuberculosis alone.
This lack of resources has consequences. In Ghana, the estimated prevalence of lymphatic filariasis (also known as elephantiasis) decreased by 88% between 2010 and 2018, while schistosomiasis (also known as bilharzosis) and onchocerciasis (river blindness) decreased by 88% between 2010 and 2018. (also known as inflammatory syndrome) increased by 39% and 81%, respectively. . But Dorcas Osei-Safo of the University of Ghana plans to fight back. Herbal medicine is important in this country. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration has already approved several herbal remedies for use against diseases including malaria. She wants to develop this approach further.
To do so, she and her team first contacted several traditional medicine practitioners and obtained samples of 15 different remedies used for different treatments. NTDs. Some were mixtures of dried herbs, while others were watery concoctions. Her goal was to test their effectiveness against laboratory cultures of various disease-causing parasites, with the aim of isolating the active ingredients that they may contain.
Almost all samples had some effect on one or more parasites. But one stands out in particular when used against trypanosomes that cause sleeping sickness. This was a dried mixture. aloeshort-stemmed succulents, and dandelion, common dandelion. Intrigued by this discovery, the team took the crude sample they were working on and ran two rounds of chromatography to separate it into its components, then repeated the test on those components.Their analysis has just been published agreement neglected tropical diseasesrevealed an oil that was proven to be 30% more effective at killing trypanosome parasites than the standard anti-trypanosomal drug, diminazene acetate.
For many researchers, that would have been the trigger to go to the patent office and negotiate further testing with drug companies. But for Osei-Safo, the point is not to create refined medicines, but rather to guide sick people to the best treatments available from herbalists. Her next move is granting funding to help us better understand why the newly discovered oil is effective and in what circumstances the herbal medicine from which it was derived might be recommended. It will be necessary to establish what should be done.■
